The ideological mood of Miliband's approach to government is becoming clear, everywhere a return to state intervention. This is intended to open "clear red water" between himself and the Tories. In the past six months Labour's leader has advocated controls on energy prices and private rents. He will intervene in the labour market against zero-hours contracts and in favour of a living wage. He will nationalise local housing land, in effect confiscating land from developers "who just hoard it".

Even the stalest pizza has a few good nibbles. There is something to be said for regional rail nationalisation. Housing land desperately needs a new approach. Tax relief for "living wage" employers is ingeniously extravagant. As for tentative devolution to city regions, Miliband's proposal may be Augustinian – "make me localist, but not yet" – but it is at least better than none.

On the other hand there are policies where Miliband, as a former energy secretary, cannot hope to be convincing. He left the country so under-invested in power stations as to bequeath a generating capacity margin down to 2%. Ofgem states that it needs over £100bn worth of new capacity by 2030. Yet just the prospect of a Labour price freeze has driven away both domestic and foreign investors. There is just one new station under construction. This is crazy intervention.

Meanwhile presenting AstraZeneca as a British treasure threatened with purchase by a dastardly foreigner is beyond silly. The company is not a Van Dyck portrait but the cobbled-together home base of a globalised pharmaceuticals industry. It swallowed many small fry itself and is run by a Frenchman and a Swede (while Pfizer's challenge is led by a Brit, Ian Read).

The business secretary, Vince Cable, has Miliband's support in running a low corporation tax regime in Britain to attract foreign investors. Yet when they come, Cable howls, "I don't want Britain to be a tax haven". In that case, stop being a tax haven and don't fix corporation tax at American levels.

Britain's car industry was a disaster when run domestically, under constant state interference. Foreign ownership has meant that within two years it should make more than 2m cars, beating its last record production year, 1972. Free trade works.

Miliband is not without supporters. When Labour's elder statesman, Alan Johnson, was asked about his leader's stance on energy, housing and banking, he said: "I don't think he has gone far enough." Of the Blairites' love affair with the City, Johnson added: "The 'comfortable with the filthy rich' time has gone." The Guardian letter on Labour's manifesto from 19 thinktankers was at least clear on this: amid all the waffle about sustainable and holistically transformative policies, they wanted no "playing safe". The same message comes from Miliband's radical policy chief, John Cruddas.

Yet just as the right lost its ideological way after the 2008 crash, so it appears did the left. The idea of returning to an old Labour platform is hardly radical. Here a voice of caution comes from the surviving Blairite, Caroline Flint, who warns (in Prospect magazine) against price freezes and one-size-fits-all policies. "We should campaign as we intend to govern," she says. If hoping that the coalition will implode of its own ineptitude was always a high risk, so too is going forward by going backwards.

The excitement that Blair and Gordon Brown were able to generate among the electorate in the mid-1990s was strategically shrewd. It involved understanding and exploiting the appeal of the prevailing Thatcherism, an appeal that had led John Major in 1992 to the largest popular vote in history (over 14m). Blair cunningly concealed his enthusiasm for Thatcherism with a new Labour rebranding, privatising and freeing markets where even she had feared to tread.

Whatever the reason for the current Tory surge – the predictable benefit of economic recovery – Miliband must find a contrasting narrative. Most serious, he must show he has a route map through the policy morass that followed 2008. The credit crunch may have delighted the left in proving that liberating markets and indulging banks can herald catastrophe. But how to regulate those markets without killing the golden geese remains as elusive as ever. It is still the central challenge of modern western government.

Miliband is an unknown quantity to most voters and it shows in his poll ratings. Some facets of a politician's personality are beyond correction, and his carping, undergraduate tone of voice and wooden presentation seem irredeemable. But a Labour leader can at least dictate his own programme. While Miliband's "cost-of-living crisis" is losing traction as wages begin to overtake prices, he should be able to capitalise on the chaos of many coalition policies, such as education, planning, local government and the environment. Every day offers him a new open goal.

Above all, Miliband has yet to give an intelligent indication of how a Labour government would discipline modern capitalism and fashion a modern welfare state. All we get at every turn is a default into more intervention. Surely Labour's path to post-Blair cannot be to pre-Blair.